The Sushi Sessions
It was one of those simple problems that are such a pleasure to solve. My friend Nathan Anderson had a neat home recording setup that he hadn't yet figured out, and I wanted to do some recording.
At about 1:30 p.m. on June 3, 2007, we started the process of recording and figuring out how it all worked. Mostly the latter. By about 8 p.m., we had tracks recorded for a few songs.
Somewhere in between, Nathan ordered sushi.
That night, I went home with the day's tracks on a CD. I was awake until 1 a.m. re-mixing some of it (and again figuring out what I was doing as I went along). The next day, we were at it again by 2 p.m. after I had stopped to pick up more sushi.
I had a few songs available for download here, but that was a violation of my agreement with my current web host (I should have known that). When I find an alternate host for filesharing, they'll be available again. For now, find me on MySpace.
Philistine (available now on that MySpace page) is a song I wrote in 2003-2004 about one or more sociopaths of my direct or indirect acquaintance. Recorded in 2007 during The Sushi Sessions, mixed and posted here on my daughter Leah's 20th birthday — April 12, 2008. This is my first original song made available online.
Nathan and his sweetie Christine moved to New Zealand in September 2007, so any further collaborations with him are likely to be long-distance!
I think it's important to note that my interpretations of these songs are not for sale anywhere, although the arrangements alone are Copyright 2006 by Jeff Seager. The bass accompaniments are entirely Nathan's doing, on his beautiful C.F. Martin acoustic bass. If this were to be recorded for sale, even in very limited quantities, I would secure the appropriate performance rights from the publisher first. That's something I strongly encourage other performers to do, as well.
One more thing, if I still have your attention. Everybody is accustomed by now to the mp3 compressed format for music, but it has disadvantages that the Ogg Vorbis format does not. It costs people like me enough money and time to make music the way we want to make it. It shouldn't cost you so much to listen. I'll be using Ogg Vorbis files for sharing my music more and more, and I hope you will too. You can read more about the benefits here.
